I was born in 1969, the same year humankind first set foot on the Moon. Maybe that’s why my head has always been somewhere on another planet. To add more cosmic signs, I arrived on October 4th—the very same date (though not the same year) when Sputnik made its first orbit around Earth. Perhaps that explains my insatiable passion for travel.
I’m the fifth of seven siblings. Not the first, not the last. A classic spot in the family lineup that trains you to become an expert at getting noticed. I learned early on that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down—but also that with a hard enough head, you can take a few blows. That, without a doubt, shaped my future.
My family was perfectly normal… in its abnormality. A seafaring father who talked about icebergs as if they were neighbors. A mother, a ceramist, who wept in front of any piece of art (even if it stood in the middle of a roundabout). One grandmother who devoured books, and another who never had access to culture but taught me what true intelligence really is. My siblings, each in their own way—but all in good ways—formed a magical cage of crickets where silence was nothing more than an urban legend.
Academically, I was more about living adventures than earning top grades—or sometimes even passing. Somehow, limping along, I studied technical drawing, maybe more out of guilt than vocation, convinced it would someday be useful to have a decent job to pay the mortgage. Spoiler: it wasn’t. After that, I worked at a bit of everything, and before I knew it, I ended up in radio. Sound captivated me, and that’s how I decided to study again—this time Film and Sound.
That led me to spend 25 years working in a hospital, organizing healthcare events, until one day someone decided my role should be to act as “the bridge between artificial intelligence and the non-clinical side of healthcare.” Yes, it sounds just as boring as it is. But it’s 8:00 to 3:00, and after 56 trips around the sun, I’ve realized my time belongs only to what truly matters: my wife, my daughter, and my geeky obsessions.
And from there, perhaps, came my books.